The Negotiating Committee is providing this update to the AMFA Membership at Southwest Airlines. This report is the only official authorized source of negotiating communications by the Committee.

As reported on Aircraft Maintenance Technician (AMT) Negotiations Update #48, during our session last week the Company proposed a comprehensive Maintenance Control Appendix of Differences that would reside separately in the back of the contract. We worked prior to this session to determine if we would give the Company the Appendix or if we wanted to stay with our concept of working the Maintenance Control rules into the current contract language. In the interest of productive bargaining, we decided to make a sizeable move by agreeing to the Company’s concept of a Maintenance Control Appendix, but we would need to work with the Maintenance Controller Subject Matter Experts (SME) to ensure the language was acceptable for their group.

We notified the Mediator and the Company prior to this session that we would be working as a Committee on Tuesday. We told them both that we would contact them around noon and update them on our progress and whether or not we would be ready to present a proposal in the afternoon. We indeed contacted them prior to noon on Tuesday and told them we would not be prepared to meet that afternoon. As we continued working throughout the day as a Committee on the difficult task of reviewing all the current language and modifying the Appendix for the work rules that applied to this group, it became obvious that we would not be ready to preset a counter proposal on Wednesday.

Later on Tuesday we notified the Mediator and the Company that we would need the entire day Wednesday to continue working on our comprehensive counter proposal. Both the Mediator and the Company acknowledged that we were going to continue to work as a Committee, and that we would contact them on Wednesday afternoon to update them on our progress. We finished with our counter proposal and thorough review later on Wednesday afternoon. We contacted both the Mediator and the Company and informed them we were able to finish our counter proposal and that we would be ready to present it on Thursday morning. We also took the unprecedented approach by sending both the Mediator and the Company an electronic copy of our proposal so that the Company could begin a review to ensure our time spent Thursday morning would be used as efficiently as possible.

We met with the Company on Thursday morning and presented our comprehensive counter proposal for the Maintenance Controllers. After we presented our counter proposal and answered clarifying questions, the Company requested a caucus. After a short period of time, the Company notified us that they did not have any further questions and that they would work on a counter offer for our next session. We would like to thank the SME’s Rob Cush, Jason Leyda, and Tim Ananiadis for their time and contributions to the process. Please contact your representative to answer any questions you may have related to these negotiations. As we cautioned previously – please continue to watch what the Company does, as opposed to what it says. We are scheduled to resume negotiations on January 5-6, and have scheduled additional dates on February 7-9 and February 14-16.